World Social Forum
Porto Alegre, January 2005

	Proposals emerging from the Roundtable
“NEW RULES FOR A NEW ECONOMY: a new global governance to move from grassroots experiences to a fair global economy”
January 28, 2005, Room I602

Roundtable participants: John Cavanagh (IPS and IFG, USA); Marcos Arruda (PACS and WSSE(Alliance 21), Brazil); Debi Barker (IFG, USA); Jean-Louis Laville (LISE-CNAM-France); Sara Larrain (Chile Sustentable and IFG, Chile)
Moderator: Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South and IFG (Philippines)

Goal: 
The Roundtable was a first attempt to compare the global strategies of the solidarity economy networks, represented by the Workgroup on a Solidarity Socioeconomy (WSSE) and the global justice movement, represented by the International Forum on Globalization (IFG). A rich dialogue was created pointing the potential complementarities, and a first set of proposals and strategies to implement them was presented.

Proposals:

1.	Prevent the commons (water, air, land, oceans, forests) from being subject to privatization and commodification.
2.	Reorient economic activity from unlimited economic growth and profit making towards people’s well being and a sustainable Earth.
3.	Promote the empowerment of individuals, communities and peoples to become the subjects of their own development as the basis for a full democracy.
4.	Support local economies on the basis of the subsidiarity principle.
5.	Build the conditions to replace global trade and finance institutions (WTO, World Bank, IMF, multilateral regional banks) with new organisms to deal democratically with global finance and global trade; they should be independent from the USA and from global corporations, and under the control of a reformed United Nations.
6.	Support forms of enterprises that promote democracy and sustainability and fight concentrated corporate power.
7.	Promote fair, progressive tax systems that serve as a tool for wealth and income redistribution.
8.	Stop fiscal evasion and abolish tax havens.
9.	Prohibit the funding of political parties by corporations.
10.	Create international rules adapted to the reality of different countries and based on the 10 principles of governance defined by the IFG.
11.	Promote relations between countries and peoples based on cooperation and solidarity, in terms that are proportional to the economic power of each country or block.
12.	Build solidarity-based markets.
13.	Develop a vision of a solidarity economy as a project and a praxis of a new, post-capitalist planetary society.
14.	Practice economic and technical development as means for social and human development.
	
Strategies:

1.	Combine three strategies dynamically and creatively: i/ research, critique and denounce the unjust, oppressive and alienating order, institutions and social relations; ii/ advance proposals for new rules, regulations and reforms that reduce the dehumanizing effects of the existing order and prepare for deeper transformation; and iii/ create the new reality from inside the old one, building solidarity-based socioeconomic relations, networks and public policies here and now.
2.	Rebuild national and global development from the bottom upwards and transform the State to serve as orchestrator and supporter of people- and community-centered sustainable development.
3.	Re-focus education on empowerment for self-development.
4.	Delegitimize and weaken global multilateral institutions as means to prepare for their transformation and/or replacement.
5.	Develop a global campaign to restructure the United Nations around the values related to the human and social rights and the right of peoples to self-development; reduce the power of the Security Commission and increase the power of the UN General Assembly.
6.	Demand the United Nations to regulate capital flows in order to stop tax wars between and within nations, to monitor the implementation of corporate codes of conduct and to impose sanctions against violations.
7.	Organize a citizens’ campaign to withdraw from the WTO the negotiations on the commons, public services, intellectual property and investment; these are issues not directly related to trade or are not to be traded in the marketplace.
8.	Promote a global justice movement that influence governments towards rejecting the neoliberal order.
9.	Pressure governments to suppress subsidies to big corporations and, instead, channel subsidies for small and medium enterprises and for community development.
10.	Establish forms of organization of work that emancipate workers from the bondages of exploitation, of environmental destruction and of mere survival.
11.	Use every opening in the existing order to advance in the struggle for global justice.
12.	Publicize existing alternatives: share policies and practices that generate relevant innovations and networking at all levels.
13.	Innovate in linking local experiences and reflections with the movements for another globalization.
14.	Overcome monetary and financial power concentration and promote the democratization of money as a means of exchange and a symbol of human work, knowledge and creativity.

ANOTHER WORLD ECONOMY IS POSSIBLE!